They are Apples and Oranges

It can be affordable if you go used.

This a can versus should. You can do this but I would strongly discourage it. I would strongly recommend buying a proper device with Mimo and multiple reasonably sized antennas.

You are going to hate Trigonometry and Calculus

The queen of England is dead

I have a "budget" device from 2019. It runs Lineage OS and works fine.

Also you are the product

Buy a phone not tied to a carrier

It is better than Wire and cryptography wise it is very solid

What's wrong with 4Gb? It works fine for light usage and you can enable swap to a SSD for when you want something a little memory hungry like a lot of tabs.

Get an SSD as it will make your life way better

That's a reasonable machine. You probably could use anything but if you want lighter weight you could use Xfce4. If it is a laptop you could use stock gnome with some swap as a backup to prevent OOM

A screenshot of Reddit

Nice cube